This would be a landmark if true. Not only a great triumph for Einstein who predicted them, but also with gr. waves, one would be able to "see" farther into the past, very near to the beginning of the Big Bang. One of last year's controversy was the result of the BICEP2, which had claimed proof of Inflation theory, as proposed by Guth/Linde, but the results were attributed to galactic dust. Now, Gr. waves could be used to confirm or not Inflation theory.

I didn't see in the article whether the GWs that may have been observed were of the cosmological variety. If they were, they could help to confirm inflation, otherwise they're still useful and interesting, but have no bearing on cosmology.

Gravity waves are like e.t. aliens - everyone believes they exist, but no one's ever seen them.

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I didn't see in the article whether the GWs that may have been observed were of the cosmological variety. If they were, they could help to confirm inflation, otherwise they're still useful and interesting, but have no bearing on cosmology.

Gravity waves are like e.t. aliens - everyone believes they exist, but no one's ever seen them.

It is difficult to devise a good general purpose antenna. But the change of orbit of binary pulsars ... tends to confirm that they are out there.

Much like dark matter. It's almost certainly there, given recent measurements, but just what it is has yet to be figured out.

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This Thursday: Scientists will provide update on the search for gravitational waves. Media Advisory says:

"Journalists are invited to join the National Science Foundation as it brings together the scientists from Caltech, MIT and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) this Thursday at 10:30 a.m. at the National Press Club for a status report on the effort to detect gravitational waves - or ripples in the fabric of spacetime - using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO)."

If it is confirmed, this will be huge - something you can tell your grand-children...

Looks like a flock of seagulls at the top of the wave….now how does that help me? Honestly you people have no consideration for those of us unfortunate enough not to have had a decent eduction because we didn't give a fuck at the time……see…..I am disadvantaged.

Looks like a flock of seagulls at the top of the wave….now how does that help me? Honestly you people have no consideration for those of us unfortunate enough not to have had a decent eduction because we didn't give a fuck at the time……see…..I am disadvantaged.

Looks like a flock of seagulls at the top of the wave….now how does that help me? Honestly you people have no consideration for those of us unfortunate enough not to have had a decent eduction because we didn't give a fuck at the time……see…..I am disadvantaged.

To make things as simple: (1) we have equations that describe a wave; (2) if we solve Einstein equation in General Relativity, you get that wave equation; (3) therefore we expect that gravitational waves should exist.

This was known since 1915, the year Einstein published his theory and all the predictions from the theory, but for g-waves, the technology wasn't there to detect them. So we're over 100 years since then, and if the discovery is confirmed, well Yaaaaaaaaaahoooooooooooooo....